The hardest problem in playing Tales of the Valiant is answering the question why. There are some easy answers, but when you ask a group to buy entirely new books, or dive into a strange system when all they have are D&D books, that is a huge ask.
For me, I play Tales of the Valiant because I can no longer stand Wizards, what they stand for, and how that business operates. The OGL, firings, DLC for physical books, platform lock in, creating the game for digital dependency, and them disrespecting the original creators of the game.
They have these unrealistic expectations, expecting the original creators of D&D to be perfect people, just like them, and it is sickening. Constantly apologizing for things a mature mind could reasonably say "this was back in the day, times are different now." I do that with every piece of media, TV show, movie, and other piece of entertainment I consume. Do we really need to keep apologizing for the past? Did we need to remove orcs and humanoid monsters from the game?
If they feel that strongly, then maybe they should sell D&D if it is such an embarrassment, and make a different game with their values.
Tales of the Valiant managers to walk a line between apology culture and respecting the past. I wish Kobold Press went more old-school in their art choices, and some of the art has this cartoon-like quality that turns me away. The design and rules are solid. The art is good to passing. It is not as bad as some of the D&D 2024 pieces though, which cross over into forcing you to accept a certain set of values.
When a game starts printing "rules for life" and "advocating morals" it has crossed over into religion. That is a red line.
On the art side, I have plenty of games with far better and more consistent art than this. Dungeon Crawl Classics, ACKS II, and Against the Darkmaster are flat-out amazing.
Part of the massive problem for all of 5E is the dependency on digital tools. Tales of the Valiant cannot escape that, and I need a Shard subscription to manage characters. I need to "pay other people" for "the right to play my game" and it sucks. I have game after game that do the same thing as ToV, and I do not need digital character sheets to play them. I can run these games by hand.
Another problem with 5E is that it made characters far weaker as they level compared to Old School Essentials or first-edition AD&D. Fireball damage is pitiful in every version of Wizards D&D (3, 4 and 5), and Gary Gygax and TSR had it right. A fireball should vaporize all low hit die creatures in the blast radius.
Modern D&D 5E lowers damage to "make combat fun" like a video game. The infinite, un-take-away-able, laser-pistol-like attack cantrip is the worst offender. Repeated weak attacks do not feel heroic! Tales of the Valiant is compatible, thus has this same issue. Instead of magic being, rare, special, and having a cost, it becomes mundane, expected, everyday, and boring. It feels like playing an arcade shooter like Galaxian.
Shooty cantrips ruin the fantasy genre. They are garbage. While trying to solve the problem of "how do we give the mage something to do every turn" they end up ruining magic and turning into a convenience, like a light switch to turn on and off without thinking or realizing the cost.
Seriously, giving the wizard something to do each turn was solved with wands and magic items, and supported the gold-piece economy. Also, artificially lengthening fights to be more like "video-game combat" only makes the "my wizard has nothing to do" problem worse.
Instead of wizards with a collection of powerful, encounter-ending, massively unbalanced spells that are only used once during an adventure; we turned them into boring, weak, DPS-classes that need to feel like they are doing something every turn on fights that grind on forever.
And the casters are still OP in 5E compared to the martial classes, and even the old-school games have martial classes right. A 1d8+4 damage attack (longsword, +2 STR bonus, +2 magic weapon) once a turn in Old School Essentials will take down an adult red dragon in a few turns of solid hits, and this is still from a one-attack-per-turn fighter. In any version of Wizards D&D? The monster hit points are scaled so high that 1d8+4 means you need dozens or hundreds of hits to defeat the same dragon. you went from doing good melee damage to none, and you needed feats to keep up with casters.
Old School Essentials, Swords & Wizardry, Adventures Dark & Deep, Basic Fantasy, and Castles & Crusades do not have this video-game problem. Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark solve the "magic has a cost" problem nicely.
I love ToV, it is a great and solid implementation of 5E. This is a playable game. I like and support it.
The bigger problem I have is with 5E itself.
It is such a strange feeling to be sitting here thinking, "ToV is great but 5E is garbage" but here I am. I know, why are you running a blog, then? I need the time and space to feel this out and come to a conclusion. There are still things that 5E does well. There are some unfix-able flaws in the design.
I think as more players try Shadowdark and other games, even ones outside of the old-school genre, they are beginning to realize this, too.
Part of me hopes Kobold Press can find a way out of this. To fix the "character sheet" problem. To give us options to make magic powerful and have a cost. I know they got great designers, and that a solid second referee book with old-school options, cost to magic, how to remove cantrips, and power mods could solve many of these problems. But how do we even begin to address them if we stay silent?
Part of the discussion is to compare and contrast the hand Kobold Press was dealt with 5E and trying to support that legacy system, and how we move forward and appeal to players who like the old-school power levels, concepts, and feeling?
The discussion is here.
Shadowdark is eclipsing Tales of the Valiant in popularity. People are moving to old-school games. The play and feeling is better there. The books are easy to read and the games are simple. People can "run these games" without a huge investment in time, money, and learning. But this is not just about Shadowdark, it is about systemic problems in 5E's design.
5E needs to change. We need options.
And I am not afraid to say it.
